by Rick Partlow
He didn’t move for a moment and I thought I’d have to give the order again.
“Yes, sir,” he said, finally.
Pops was staring at me.
“You really think we can do this? Just the three of us and a few Helta techs? They can barely stand to watch MMA, much less fight a fucking battle. What do you think we’re gonna accomplish?”
I didn’t want to snap at him. Mark Tremonti was as close to unflappable as anyone I’d ever met except Jambo, and if he was rattled, it was because there was good reason to be, and there was something wrong with me for not being rattled.
“I think,” I said, “that we’re going to do whatever we can with what we have left. I think it’s our job. And I think if I’m going to die out here, and if the Tevynians are going to wipe us out, and everything that we’ve done these last couple years has been for nothing…well, I think I’d rather die killing them than sitting on my ass in this station waiting for the missiles to hit. What do you think, Mr. Tremonti?”
Why the fuck, I wondered, was I so cold? Why was I not gibbering, paralyzed with fear? Even if the Rangers who’d died hadn’t been part of my command, even if they hadn’t exactly been my friends, I should have been scared shitless. Any sane person would have been. Even Pops was, I could feel it. Quinn, who was as steady a soldier as I’d seen at his age, was shaken. And I wasn’t.
Quinn was coming up over the curve in the corridor, Tygart over his shoulder, the Helta shuffling reluctantly behind him.
“I used to think,” Pops said, finally answering my question, “that James Bowie was the coolest, stony-eyed killer I’d ever met, a man who wouldn’t blink when the tangoes had us surrounded and outgunned. But you got him beat, Andy. You got him beat by a fucking mile.”
“Not a chance. If Jambo was here, he’d be making some bad joke to distract everyone. Me, I’m just moving forward like a driver at night, hypnotized by the white line.”
I tried to get to the personnel entrance beside the cargo lock without stepping on any bodies, or parts of bodies. It was a losing battle. At least the security pad was intact, and it took my override code. The outer lock slid open and I waved the others in.
“Come on,” I urged them. “Let’s get this thing out of here before someone gets around to blowing it up.”
***
“This will not work,” Fen-Sooyan insisted, eyes not leaving the engineering control panel, fingers weaving patterns in the haptic holograms. He had his suit helmet off and the internal padding had compressed his hair, leaving it spiky and clumped up, giving him a sort of wet-rat look, and it was hard to take him seriously. “This ship’s main weapons are not functional. We have point-defense turrets and controlling those from the bridge is nearly impossible. They are slaved to the missile defense sensors for a reason.”
“Thanks for pointing that out yet again,” I told him, my patience fraying around the edges. The rest of the Helta had gone down to engineering to fire up the reactor and ride herd on the drives, but I’d gotten Fen-Sooyan, chief technical officer of the Helta crew, to be my assistant bridge officer.
I wished he would shut up. I was having enough trouble trying to remember the command sequence to access the ship’s maneuvering thrusters, and every time I tried to ask the computer for help, it took me to a different screen for a tutorial and then I had to find my way back to the original command screen.
Who the hell had Daniel Gatlin contracted for this operating system, Microsoft?
“How’s it going up there, boss?” Pops asked. His voice came over the earbud from my comm unit rather than my helmet, because I had, reluctantly, divested myself of my armor in order to fly this damned ship. I felt naked in just my combat utilities.
“Getting there,” I told him, biting back my initial response about how it would be going better if people stopped talking to me. “How’s Tygart?”
“The sickbay isn’t fully stocked yet, but we got him out of his pressure suit and we’re doing what we can for him. He’s started to talk a little. You want me up on the bridge?”
“No, you two stay down there and take care of him. I’d have to teach you how to use any of the stations up here and I’m only about halfway sure how to do it myself. Strap down and hang on. This could get rough.”
“Roger that. Good luck, Andy.”
There it was. Finally, something I remembered. The drydock and the ship were computer animations on a screen, tiny as a model and I traced a line sideways out of the shipyard framework, then touched a button marked “execute.”
I didn’t feel the thrust, not with the artificial gravity, but I heard the steady pounding of the steering jets against the hull, like some downstairs neighbor complaining about the noise. In the image, the Bravo ship floated clear of the drydock and I reached out over the top of the helm station to the tactical board and stabbed at another control, bringing up the display from that station onto the main screen.
What I saw was enough to make me want to run back to the shipyard and crawl into the solar storm shelter.
Space is big. If I talk about the Earth-Moon system, it sounds like nothing compared to the vast distances I’d traveled since that first trip in the Truthseeker, but it’s still an incredibly vast area, over 200,000 miles from one body to the other, extending all the way around the planet. By comparison, ships, even the Helta cruisers the Tevynians had stolen and we had copied were a few hundred yards long, and most of battling one of them was trying to get close enough to land a blow before they could dodge it.
The entire Earth-Moon system was a battlefield, with so many cruisers, fighters and shuttles that I couldn’t keep one of them in sight long enough to identify it. The computer simulated energy weapons with blue flashes, drew yellow halos around missiles and railgun rounds and highlighted friendly vessels in blue, while likely enemy ships got a demonic red, and the whole display seemed like the inside of an old kaleidoscope.
I touched the one control I knew about simply because Julie had made a point that Olivera never used it. He hated the voice interface with the ship’s computer system, but I sure as hell needed it right now.
“Voice Command System access,” I said, trying to make each word as clear as possible, remembering Julie telling me about the trouble with the system misunderstanding the speaker until it got used to their vocal cadence. “Clearance Alpha Echo Four-Three-Nine.”
“Clearance recognized, Major Clanton,” the familiar, female voice told me. I wondered how much Gatlin had to pay to use it. He’d probably passed the cost on to the government. “I am designated Bravo. How may I help you?”
“I need to activate computer-assisted navigation and tactical controls. Activate drive field to station-keeping relative to the drydock facility.”
“Drive field activated. Station-keeping confirmed.”
Station-keeping was using the drive field to hold the ship in place relative to a known position, in this case the drydock. Not that I wanted to stay around here, but I didn’t want to go drifting off until I had an idea where we should point the damned thing.
“Bravo, where is the greatest concentration of enemy fighters?” I asked, unable to sort through the flickering light show on the screen to find the information myself. “Highlight in green.”
“The largest concentration of enemy fighters is currently one thousand kilometers from our position, highlighted in green on the display.”
The green glob was fairly close, consisting of about two dozen of the space-fighters. General Olivera hated that term, thought it sounded too much like something out of a 1980s Japanese cartoon, but we had to distinguish somehow between the Tevynian dual-environment fighters, which were basically atmospheric fighter jets with rocket engines for short orbital flights, and the space-based fighter craft that they carried around in their carriers. These had no sort of aerodynamics, converted from the ubiquitous orbital transfer vehicles used by the Helta and their allies at every one of their space facilities through the simple expediency of pla
ting the thing in alloy armor and strapping on a point-defense laser turret…then plopping a suicidal maniac into the middle as a pilot.
Individually, they were vulnerable and lightly-armed and only dangerous to a shuttle, but they were never alone. They swarmed over cruisers like a cloud of mosquitos, concentrating their laser fire at the same point on the shields, trying to cause an overload and collapse the drive field. I had seen them destroy Helta cruisers during the Battle for Helta Prime, and I knew if any of our ship were decisively engaged with an enemy vessel, the fighters would try to take advantage of their distraction and hit them from behind.
“Bravo, take us into the center of that concentration,” I ordered, “at maximum acceleration. Slave all point-defense turrets to one targeting reticle and display reticle on the main screen.” I shot Fen-Sooyan a tight smile. “I know we can’t do anything about those cruisers without our main weapons, but we can sure as hell keep those fighters off their back.”
“Would it not be wiser,” he asked me, finally turning from the engineering console to give me a baleful glare, “to simply take this ship and run? To preserve it so that you maintain interstellar capability for another day?”
“He who fights and runs away,” I murmured, remembering something I’d told Joon-Pah a long time ago, “lives to fight another day.”
“Yes, exactly,” Fen-Sooyan agreed as close to burbling with enthusiasm as his ursine race got.
“Maximum acceleration confirmed,” the computer told me. “Lay in course to bring the fighters into range of the point-defense lasers, Major Clanton?”
“Negative, Bravo,” I said. “We’re going to ram right into them with the drive field and rip them to atoms.” Fen-Sooyan’s horrified expression made me laugh. “Damn the torpedoes,” I told him. “Full speed ahead.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I had, in the last few years, lived the life of a fairly successful writer with a moderately-lucrative TV show, which meant I’d spent about ten months of the year in a boring routine of writing eight hours a day and the other two months vacationing wherever the hell I wanted since I wasn’t married and hadn’t been interested in a long-term relationship until I met Julie. I’d visited most of the more interesting national parks, gone to New Zealand to see the real Middle Earth, gone moose hunting in Alaska and, most relevant to the current situation, done lots of SCUBA diving down in the Florida Keys.
The fighters were like schools of fry, trying to scatter at the appearance of a predator, but too small and too slow to get out of the way in time. And while Bravo might not have had the teeth of a great white shark, it sure as hell had the bulk. The drive field of a cruiser propelled the ship by churning up the fabric of spacetime, a cosmic boat propeller, and any ship not protected by its own drive field would get caught in the churn and ripped into its component atoms.
A few of the fighters got off parting shots, spitting into the face of their executioner before Bravo’s drive field turned them into expanding balls of gas. Their deaths didn’t go unnoticed and didn’t come without a price. The cruiser shuddered and lurched with every impact, kinetic energy surging into the field like feedback, no single collision enough to attenuate our drive field but the accumulation dragging at us.
“Can we please not do that?” Fen-Sooyan asked, teeth bared. “The drive field was not designed for such things.”
“Improvise, adapt and overcome, my friend.”
“I understand what each of those words means individually, but what is their significance when said together in such a way?”
“They mean that we’re going to do what we can to win this battle. And if that means splitting this ship right down the middle, that’s what we’re going to do.” I looked up, as if the ship’s computer was the statue of some ancient god looming above me and I was praying to it. “Bravo, find us the next largest concentration of fighters and set a course into the middle of them.”
The computer was following my instructions, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t looking at the fighters, wasn’t looking at the big picture of the battle. I was trying to find Alpha, trying to find Julie. It was nearly impossible, with the cruisers spinning and turning and micro-jumping from high Earth orbit out past the Moon and then back again, but finally, I picked her blue dot out of the sea of enemy red out past Lunar orbit. She was engaged with two enemy cruisers, stinging them with her particle cannon, lacking an impulse gun that would have finished the fight in minutes.
Alpha moved like a ballet dancer, taking full advantage of the physics-bending capabilities of the drive, doing things neither the Helta nor the Tevynians had ever dreamed of even attempting in the huge ship. She might have been appointed the captain of the vessel, but with a crew of only a half a dozen, I knew she was running the helm personally, and maybe tactical as well, flying the cruiser like the biggest fighter jet ever.
Bravo shuddered with feedback as the computer carried out my last order and enemy fighters evaporated in our wake. I barely noticed, fixated on the laser batteries lancing in to strike Alpha from two different directions, at the rainbow ring flexing around her ship as her drive field came close to overload. She’d been streaking across the black but now she slowed nearly to a stop, keeping only the momentum she’d had when she turned on her drive field. She was a baby whale in a bathtub until her field regenerated and I had no weapons that would reach that far.
Except the ship.
“Bravo,” I snapped, “micro-jump as close to Alpha’s coordinates as you can and initiate drive field intersect at a survivable angle with whichever of those two enemy cruisers is the closest after the jump.”
“Yes, Major. Micro-jump in ten seconds.”
“What?” Fen-Sooyan squawked, and I didn’t need the translator to tell me what he was saying. “Have you gone mad?”
I ignored him and hit the control to the general public-address speakers.
“Prepare for micro-jump. Everyone, strap down and secure for field intersect.”
The Heltan beside me was chanting something in his own language that my translation program informed me wasn’t directly translatable to English but was basically a death song. I figured if I had anything that could be called a death song, I would have been singing it, too. If I could sing worth a shit.
What would be a good death song? Maybe something from Guns and Roses? I’ve always liked Sweet Child of Mine, but maybe Paradise City would be a better choice?
We jumped. Then we jumped again, and it was exactly as unpleasant as it usually was, except I didn’t puke. The viewscreen shifted from a view of half the Earth and all of the Moon to nothing, then to burnished-bright silver mountains shifting on all sides of us, too fucking close and getting closer and….
“Fuck!” The word burst from me like a frag grenade exploding, without any sort of intent, as reflexive as breathing for a Marine.
I’d expected it. Hell, I’d ordered it, but it still, somehow, caught me by surprise. We hadn’t actually hit the Tevynian cruiser, of course, because the drive fields extended for miles from the ship in each direction. All we’d done was graze our field against one of theirs, and the collision had sent us in one direction and her in another. I didn’t know what had happened to their ship, and it was a long few seconds before I was in any condition to speculate about what had happened to ours.
I was strapped into the seat, and it was a damned good thing, because otherwise, I would have been sliding out of it. A 240-pound linebacker had slammed into me sprinting a four-oh forty, or at least that was what it felt like. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t control my muscles. It only lasted a few seconds, but in my head, it stretched for hours and when I finally sucked in air, I felt as if I’d been trapped on the ocean floor and had to swim to the surface before I could take my next breath.
I pushed myself up in the chair and realized the computer was shouting at me.
“Major Clanton, the drive field is down. Full repropagation will take four minutes and twenty-six seconds. We
will be able to maneuver in one minute, thirty-five seconds.”
I heard the words this time, but their meaning couldn’t penetrate the sand packed into my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. The words filtered downward into my consciousness.
No drive. No shields. No weapons. Got it.
“This is engineering.” The voice startled me because it was speaking English without an accent, but then I realized the computer was translating the Helta crew down there automatically. “We have lost two power conduits. They are completely burned out and will need replacement. Two more are strained to the breaking point and will not take another field intercept.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I muttered, yanking loose my seat restraints. “We ain’t got a field to intercept.”
Fen-Sooyan was lolling in his seat, one hand twitching, moaning softly. I wished I had the luxury of being insensate, but instead, I had to live with the consequences of my decision. I stumbled over to him, touching my earbud.
“Pops, can you hear me?” I called. “Quinn?”
“Yeah, we’re here,” Pops said, though he didn’t seem happy about it. “Barely.”
“Get Tygart back into his suit. And see if you can find a fucking escape pod. We’re driftwood for a minute and a half, and I don’t know where the fuck we are.”
“We are,” Bravo informed me helpfully, “approximately thirty thousand kilometers from our previous position.”
“Use Imperial measurements, Goddammit,” I grunted, grabbing Fen-Sooyan’s helmet and sliding it over his head. He jerked against me and I had to hold down his right hand with my knee while I sealed the helmet in place, then touched a control on his suit’s wrist to fill it with air from the tank.
“Metric measurements are standard for the Coalition and for the United States Space Force,” the computer informed me.
“I don’t give a fuck!” I insisted, jogging to the side of the bridge, to a storage closet where I’d stashed my armor.